“I just love the sound of it all”: The solo song Noel Gallagher ranks among his best
Few songwriters have captured the essence of British rock and roll in recent years quite like Noel Gallagher. From his rise to prominence during the Britpop boom of the 1990s, Gallagher and Oasis came to define that era of rock music, penning countless iconic tracks which still resonate with millions of listeners worldwide today. Although his solo project, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, might not have achieved the same commercial success as Oasis, that hasn’t stopped Gallagher from continuing to write groundbreaking tunes.
The peak of Gallagher’s career as a songwriter came during the early years of Oasis’ success. In just a few short years, he penned timeless classics like ‘Wonderwall’, ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ and ‘Live Forever’, to name just a handful of Oasis’ beloved hits. Those songs alone were enough to cement Noel Gallagher in the history books of British music indefinitely, but he continued his reputation as a prolific songwriter even after the initial Oasis hype had died down.
Although Gallagher has never managed to recapture the genius of his earlier material, there are certainly some gems hidden within his solo work. After all, much of the material contained in the first High Flying Birds album, released in 2011, had been written while Gallagher was still with his former band. Simultaneously, though, the songwriter was keen to distance his solo work from the Britpop mastery of Oasis, particularly during the early years.
One track which managed to make the crossover from Oasis to the High Flying Birds was Gallagher’s debut solo single, ‘The Death of You and Me’. According to the songwriter, that track had originally been written during the latter days of Oasis, but it did not seem to fit with their inherent sound. “I wrote that when I was in Oasis, and I’d written it in that key,” Gallagher later recalled, “And I remember, at the time, thinking, ‘Who’s going to sing this?’”
The inherent sound of Oasis simply was not suited to the sounds of ‘The Death of You and Me’, so the song was shelved until Gallagher could unearth it for his solo project. When the time came around, however, he pushed for the song to be the High Flying Birds’ first single, owing both to its quality and how different it was to anything Oasis had recorded.
“When I came to record it for the first High Flying Birds album,” Gallagher remembered, “When it was all finished, and there was the sit-down around the table of ‘what’s going to be the first single?’ Everybody wanted ‘If I Had A Gun’ or ‘What A Life’, and I thought that was being a bit obvious.” Explaining his choice to make the song his first solo release, he shared, “I just thought, ‘Okay, let’s put this one out first, because then this is not Oasis 2.0.’”
Not only did ‘The Death of You and Me’ represent a change in the songwriting style of Gallagher, moving from the brash rock and roll of Oasis to something a little more vulnerable and sonically grandiose, but it also signified a return to form for Gallagher’s songwriting quality. “If push comes to shove,” he attested, “I think it might be my favourite of all the songs I’ve done solo. I just love the sound of it all.”
It certainly makes sense that ‘The Death of You and Me’ is a favourite of Gallagher’s, as the song largely set the tone for the rest of the High Flying Birds’ discography. It would have been easy for the songwriter to try and recapture the themes and mood of early Oasis when the band were at their commercial peak, but instead, he chose to take his work in an entirely new direction, distinguishing his solo work from the rest of his musical material.
